#tim snyder

#TimothySnyder Spoke in Cincinnati #OnTyranny

BOOK

Tim Snyder - On Tyranny

Chapter 1: Do Not Obey in Advance.

Chapter 2: Defend Institutions.

Chapter 3: Beware the One-Party State.

Chapter 4: Take Responsibility for the Face of the World.

Chapter 5: Remember Professional Ethics.

Chapter 6: Be Wary of Paramilitaries.

Chapter 7: Be Reflective If You Must Be Armed.

Chapter 8: Stand Out.

Chapter 9: Be Kind to Our Language.

Chapter 10: Believe in Truth.

Chapter 11: Investigate.

Chapter 12: Make Eye Contact and Small Talk.

Chapter 13: Practice Corporeal Politics.

Chapter 14: Establish a Private Life.

Chapter 15: Contribute to Good Causes.

Chapter 16: Learn from Peers in Other Countries.

Chapter 17: Listen for Dangerous Words.

Chapter 18: Be Calm When the Unthinkable Arrives.

Chapter 19: Be a Patriot.

Who You Better Call by Tim Snyder in Ontario, Canada

TNR The News Record: Independently published by University of Cincinnati students.

"Demonstrators gathered at Smale Riverfront Park on Saturday, Oct. 18, 2025, in protest of President Donald Trump. The event joined thousands of “No Kings” demonstrations across the United States (U.S.), with seven other protests taking place in the Greater Cincinnati area.

The protest was organized by a team of activist groups including 50501, Indivisible and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) among others. Cassy Woelfel, a volunteer organizer for 50501, said the coalition came together to assert democratic values and oppose “executive overreach” by the Trump administration.

“This president is not running this country like a democracy, he's running it like a regime,” Woelfel said. “I think the umbrella message of ‘No Kings’ has really connected with people, particularly those who were not involved in activism before and are looking to take a stand against this administration.”

Speakers addressed the crowd along the banks of the Ohio River from 1 p.m. to 5 p.m. Following an opening performance by the Cincinnati Men’s Chorus, American historian and professor of history at the University of Toronto Timothy Snyder clarified the movement’s purpose.

“When we say no kings, we are saying yes to freedom,” Snyder said. “A king is someone who wants oligarchy, not opportunity. Violence and fear rather than law. Submission rather than dignity. This is why we say, ‘No Kings.’”

Concerns over the president’s immigration policy, particularly his mass deportations of undocumented immigrants, were expressed by several attendees.

Tomasz Pankiewicz, a student at Walnut Hill High School, called the practices inhumane and autocratic. “My biggest issue is the lack of due process in Trump’s deportation of illegal immigrants, especially since many of them are here legally and are being deported anyway,” Pankiewicz said. “I’ve seen the way history has played out before with fascist leaders, and I’m seeing the rise of another authoritarian leader in our country right now.”

Sylvester Mckinney, a College Hill native, labeled the deportations as xenophobic. “I’m sick of the hate, I’m sick of seeing women thrown to the ground by ICE agents just because they don’t look ‘American,’” McKinney said. “If you were born in America, you are an American.”

Ayman Soliman, a Cincinnati Imam and former Cincinnati Children’s Hospital chaplain who was detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) for 73 days in Butler County, Kentucky, before his release on Sept. 19, 2025, condemned the Trump administration for arresting him without cause.

“This president claims to be detaining and deporting those who are here illegally and who are undocumented,” Soliman said. “I was legal from day one, I was documented from day one, I did everything right and yet I was detained.”

Federal funding cuts were another issue cited by protestors as a reason for participating. Caitlin Vetter, a preschool teacher in Hamilton County, said she attended the protest out of concern for her students and for the future of public education in the United States.

“I’ve been working with children for the last ten years, and they deserve a better future than what is taking place in this country right now,” Vetter said. “Our current president is trying to be king, and his budget cuts are dismantling public and special education in this country.”

Forrest Brandt, a Vietnam veteran and 1976 UC alum, fears budget cuts to the Veterans Association (VA) proposed in Project 2025, a right-wing policy roadmap published in April 2023 by the Heritage Foundation.

“There is a definite attack in Project 2025 to get money from VA medical care,” Brandt said while holding a sign that read “I’m a veteran, not a sucker or a loser.” “I want to see my coverage preserved and decent healthcare for everyone, and we won’t see that while the Project 2025 people are in charge.”

Several Ohio voting advocacy groups were represented at the event. Claire Wagner, president of the League of Women Voters of the Cincinnati Area, said her non-partisan group attended the protest to raise awareness for voter’s rights and encourage voter participation in Ohio elections.

“We’re here because this is about voters losing their rights, and about representatives who feel they don’t need to respond to their constituents because they represent gerrymandered districts,” Wagner said. “People feel like hiding, especially in this climate, if they are not part of the visible majority.”

Wagner also urged University of Cincinnati (UC) students to exercise their vote in Cincinnati’s upcoming municipal elections on Nov. 4, 2025. “The local elections, your township trustees, your city council and your mayor, they affect you every day with their decisions,” she said. “This is our message this year: be vocal, vote local.”

David Pepper, former chairman of the Ohio Democratic Party, also called on UC students to vote with their future in mind. “From gun violence to climate change, older Americans are shoving the costs of a crumbling democracy onto the younger generation because they think young folks won’t vote,” Pepper said. “Voting is good to do anyway, but in this case it’s imperative to protect younger generations from all the costs they are going to inherit from all the broken politics.”

Several interest groups at the protest were represented by UC students. Angela Britton, a third-year student at UC and secretary of the Young Democratic Socialists of America UC chapter, said their organization attended the protest to gather petition signatures calling for sanctuary campus status at UC. Under these demands, ICE agents would be required to show a judicial warrant before entering campus buildings.

“The people of Cincinnati pay taxes that end up in the pocket of UC,” Britton said. “If the administration receiving that money decides it’s OK for ICE to come onto campus, then the people who pay those taxes have every right to say no.”

Ameer Alkayali, a member of the UC chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine and one of the first to speak at the protest, called on Ohio leaders to divest from the state of Israel. “Why do our representatives continue to support the genocide in Palestine?” Alkayali asked the crowd. “If the people do not support genocide, why should our representatives?”

Kean Babcock, a fourth-year neuroscience major at UC and member of About Face, a veterans advocacy group that provides legal counsel for military members seeking conscientious objector ship, said he attended the protest to encourage national guardsmen to refuse deployments by President Trump into American cities. “In Ohio, our national guard is being deployed to DC and Chicago,” Babcock said. “We want to get our brothers and sisters in arms out of these illegal, unconstitutional orders from Washington.”

No Kings organizers said events will adhere to a "shared commitment to nonviolent protest and community safety." To assist attendees and de-escalate potential conflicts, volunteer medics and safety marshals affiliated with 50501 were posted around the park. Marshals encouraged protesters to stay off the nearby John A. Roebling Suspension Bridge.

Sherwin Little, a volunteer marshal and 1982 alum of the University of Cincinnati, said he hoped to be a reassuring presence to demonstrators. “We’re here to be helpful and to let people know we’re monitoring the situation,” he said. “I was an elementary teacher for many years, so it’s a bit like doing lunch-room duty.”

According to organizers, more than 7 million people attended over 2,700 No Kings protests worldwide, a projection that would surpass crowd estimates of 4-6 million at the first No Kings nationwide protest on June 14, 2025.

Tim Snyder - On Tyranny

DO NOT OBEY IN ADVANCE

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

May 9, 2022

Heather Cox Richardson

Weeks of speculation that Russian president Vladimir Putin would use the May 9 Victory Day celebration to announce he was escalating his war on Ukraine were incorrect. The celebration went off—subdued this year—and Putin delivered a speech, but it simply covered his usual topics. During the day, hackers broke into Russian televisions with the message: “The blood of thousands of Ukrainians and hundreds of murdered children is on your hands…. TV and the authorities are lying. No to war.” Instead, the powerful speech of the occasion came from Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky, filmed outside walking down Khreshchatyk Street, the main street in Kyiv, where normally there would be a Victory Day parade. Zelensky claimed Ukrainian ownership of victory against the Nazis in World War II, then turned to the story of the present. Ukrainians are fighting, he said, “[f]or our freedom. For our independence. So that the victory of our ancestors was not in vain. They fought for freedom for us and won. We are fighting for freedom for our children, and therefore we will win…. And very soon there will be two Victory Days in Ukraine. And someone will not even have one left. We won then, we will win now, too! And Khreshchatyk [Street] will see the parade of victory—the victory of Ukraine.” At home, a big story broke over the weekend, reminding us that the ties of the Republican Party to Russians and the effect of those ties on Ukraine reach back not just to former president Trump, but at least to the 2008 presidential campaign of Arizona senator John McCain. Late Saturday night, political strategist Steve Schmidt, who worked on a number of Republican political campaigns including McCain’s when he ran for president in 2008, began to spill what he knows about that 2008 campaign. Initially, this accounting took the form of Twitter threads, but on Sunday, Schmidt put the highlights into a post on a Substack publication called The Warning. The post’s title distinguished the author from those journalists and members of the Trump administration who held back key information about the dangerous behavior in Trump’s White House in order to include it in their books. The post was titled: “No Books. No Money. Just the Truth.” Schmidt left the Republican Party in 2018, tweeting that by then it was “fully the party of Trump. It is corrupt, indecent and immoral. With the exception of a few governors…it is filled with feckless cowards who disgrace and dishonor the legacies of the party's greatest leaders.... Today the GOP has become a danger to our democracy and our values.” Schmidt helped to start The Lincoln Project, designed to sink Trump Republicans through attack ads and fundraising, in late 2019. The apparent trigger for Schmidt’s accounting was goading from McCain’s daughter Meghan McCain, a sometime media personality who, after years of slighting Schmidt, recently called him a pedophile, which seems to have been a reference to the fact that a colleague with whom Schmidt started The Lincoln Project was accused of online sexual harassment of men and boys. Schmidt resigned over the scandal. Schmidt was fiercely loyal to Senator McCain and had stayed silent for years over accusations that he was the person who had chosen then–Alaska governor Sarah Palin as McCain’s vice presidential candidate, lending legitimacy to her brand of uninformed fire-breathing radicalism, and about his knowledge of McCain’s alleged affair with a lobbyist. In his tweetstorm, Schmidt set the record straight, attributing the choice of Palin to McCain’s campaign director and McCain himself, and acknowledging that the New York Times had been correct in the reporting of McCain’s relationship with the lobbyist, despite the campaign’s angry denial. More, though, Schmidt’s point was to warn Americans that the mythmaking that turns ordinary people into political heroes makes us unwilling to face reality about their behavior and, crucially, makes the media unwilling to tell us the truth about it. As journalist Sarah Jones wrote in PoliticusUSA, Schmidt’s “broader point is how we, as Americans, don’t like to be told the truth and how our media so loves mythology that they work to deliver lies to us instead of holding the powerful accountable.” Schmidt’s biggest reminder, though, was that the director of the 2008 McCain campaign was Richard (Rick) Davis, a founding partner of Davis Manafort, the political consulting firm formed in 1996. By 2003, the men were representing pro-Russia Ukrainian oligarch Viktor Yanukovych; in July 2004, U.S. journalist Paul Klebnikov was murdered in Moscow for exposing Russian government corruption; and in June 2005, Manafort proposed that he would work for Putin’s government in former Soviet republics, Europe, and the United States by influencing politics, business dealings, and news coverage. From 2004 to 2014, Manafort worked for Yanukovych and his party, trying to make what the U.S. State Department called a party of “mobsters and oligarchs” look legitimate. In 2016, Manafort went on to lead Donald Trump’s campaign, and the ties between him, the campaign, and Russia are well known. Less well known is that in 2008, Manafort’s partner Rick Davis ran Republican candidate John McCain’s presidential campaign. Schmidt writes that McCain turned a blind eye to the dealings of Davis and Manafort, apparently because he was distracted by the fallout when the story of his personal life hit the newspapers. Davis and Manafort were making millions by advancing Putin’s interests in Ukraine and eastern Europe, working for Yanukovych and Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska. Schmidt notes that “McCain spent his 70th birthday with Oleg Deripaska and Rick Davis on a Russian yacht at anchor in Montenegro.” “There were two factions in the campaign,” Schmidt tweeted, “a pro-democracy faction and…a pro Russia faction,” led by Davis, who—like Manafort—had a residence in Trump Tower. It was Davis who was in charge of vetting Palin. McCain was well known for promising to stand up to Putin, and Palin’s claim that she could counter the growing power of Russia in part because “[t]hey’re our next-door neighbors, and you can actually see Russia from land here in Alaska, from an island in Alaska” became a long-running joke (the comment about seeing Russia from her house came from a Saturday Night Live skit). But a terrific piece in The Nation by Mark Ames and Ari Berman in October 2008 noted: “He may talk tough about Russia, but John McCain’s political advisors have advanced Putin’s imperial ambitions.” The authors detailed Davis’s work to bring the Balkan country of Montenegro under Putin’s control and concluded that either McCain “was utterly clueless while his top advisers and political allies ran around the former Soviet domain promoting the Kremlin’s interests for cash, or he was aware of it and didn’t care.” Trump’s campaign and presidency, along with Putin’s deadly assault on Ukraine, puts into a new light the fact that McCain’s campaign manager was Paul Manafort’s business partner all the way back in 2008.

—

Notes:

https://www.yahoo.com/news/gop-strategist-quits-apos-corrupt-135557288.html

https://www.thedailybeast.com/putin-sounded-like-a-loser-in-his-victory-day-speech

https://www.nbcnews.com/video/president-zelenskyy-soon-there-will-be-two-victory-days-in-ukraine-139595845968

The WarningNo Books. No Money. Just the Truth.This is a story about lying. Public lying. It is a story about Senator John McCain’s lying, and the damage it has done to many people, including me. It is also a story about my lying because, ultimately, John McCain’s lie became mine. Over time, that lie has become heavier as I have been abused by the family of the man I worked for…Read morea day ago · 1,181 likes · 355 comments · Steve Schmidt

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/05/09/russia-tv-hack-victory-day-ukraine-war/

https://www.politicususa.com/2022/05/09/steve-schmidts-warning-delivers-kill-shot-to-john-mccains-myth.html

https://apnews.com/article/122ae0b5848345faa88108a03de40c5a

https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/06/25/AR2008062502858_2.html

https://www.gawker.com/5048485/picture-this-john-mccain-visits-criminals-yacht

Steve Schmidt @SteveSchmidtSESI had no interest whatsoever in running a Presidential Campaign in 2008. One of my closest friends was running John McCain’s campaign and John Weaver was the chief strategist. There were two factions in the campaign. There was a pro-democracy faction and there was

10,107 Retweets34,407 Likes

May 8th 2022

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/sarah-palin-russia-house/

https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/mccains-kremlin-ties/

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

[from comments]

ted keyes

Folks, if you haven’t already read Tim Snyder’s book, “The Road to Unfreedom” you should do that now. Two other important and informative books on much of the grift and graft explained in this letter are in “Mr. Putin” and “There is Nothing for you Here” by Dr. Fiona Hill.

These historians explain how Putin’s Regime has been unlawfully stealing cash out of Russian industries controlled by handpicked Oligarchs, and export it to launderers abroad so as to hide it, before bringing it back “clean”. Political payoffs legal and illegal are part of the laundromat that has been financing anti democracy efforts by facilitating the process. In this way some of our leaders have enabled the war crimes perpetrated by Putin. And it has to stop!

Part of that process is exporting Embezzled Russian money into legitimate banking via questionable Cypress banks (thanks Wilbur Ross) then into business like commercial real estate (London, NYC, Floria) and manufacturing, but the dark part is the lobby industry, campaign donations (PACS/NRA/Christian Right PACS), “consulting fees” and illegality (bribes and/or promises to invest in bogus projects in Senators home states…like an old Aluminum plant in Kentucky, etc, etc). The KGB and Russian Mafia have worked hand in hand for longer than most of us have been alive. They are the all stars of all kinds of schemes and political payoffs. Disinformation, division, destabilization, annexation is the Russian/Putin playbook.